Marketing Virtual Assistant

A marketing virtual assistant is a remote hire who runs cross channel marketing execution for you: email sends, blog uploads, ad edits, list clean up, and reports. You own the plan and the spend. They ship the work you brief each week.

The role sits between a generalist virtual assistant (VA) and a specialist marketer. You get someone who executes across ads, content, email, and search at a lower rate than a senior marketer, and with faster onboarding than a permanent hire.

Most marketing VAs work offshore. The Philippines leads supply on English fluency, US time zone cover, and rates from $5 to $12 an hour in 2024. For channel context, read our outsourcing digital marketing primer.

Key takeaways

• A marketing virtual assistant owns weekly marketing execution across ads, content, email, and search from a remote setup.
• Offshore rates run $5–$12 per hour in 2024, while senior in-house marketers cost five to ten times more.
• The role fits small teams that need marketing output before they can justify a full-time in-house salary.
• Common work includes campaign calendars, keyword research, ad campaign management, email lifecycle, and monthly reporting.
• Strategy stays with the client while the VA owns execution, and the clearer that split, the faster the ramp.

How it works

A marketing virtual assistant works remotely on retainer or by the hour, and reports to whoever owns marketing on the client side. You brief the work in Slack, Asana, or a shared doc, and the VA turns each brief into shipped tasks weekly.

Engagement usually starts with a scoping call, a written task list, and a two-week trial.

Rates depend on skill depth and sourcing route — freelance platforms sit at the low end, managed outsourcing firms in the middle, and specialist agencies at the top.

Rate source: Payscale plus Upwork and Fiverr benchmarks, 2024.

Most engagements are month-to-month, cancellable on 30 days’ notice, and priced against a bucket of hours. The client owns strategy while the VA owns execution. The more explicit that split, the fewer misfires per week.

A typical week runs on a loop: Monday brief, midweek build, Thursday sends, Friday numbers. The campaign calendar is the control surface, so a VA who keeps it current saves you more time than one who writes faster copy.

Scope splits cleanly once you write it down.

Skill depth matters more than years — a three-year VA who has run 40 Shopify launches will outperform a five-year VA who only handled inbox management. For scope basics, see our Virtual Assistant Services breakdown.

Examples

Marketing VA setups range from one part-time hire to a four-person pod. The pattern holds across US, UK, and Australian teams buying from providers in the Philippines, India, and Latin America, and the VA always sits under senior direction.

A solo founder might hire one VA for 20 hours a week to run every channel end to end. A Series-A team might build a pod of four, each owning one channel and reporting into a marketing lead.

Buffer, the social scheduling company, has run a distributed marketing model since 2013. Content, community, and lifecycle work sit with remote contractors and remote staff rather than an in-office marketing floor. Marketing VAs run the execution layer underneath.

Real estate is one of the highest-volume users. US brokers routinely staff a Manila-based VA to run listing photos, Multiple Listing Service (MLS) uploads, drip email, and Facebook ad sets — which frees the agent to close deals.

A typical broker spend is 15–25 hours per week, and the work is repeatable rather than creative.

E-commerce brands use marketing VAs for Shopify catalogue updates, product launch email sequences, and landing page edits. Rates land at $8–$10 per hour through Philippines-based firms, per 2024 HubSpot marketing statistics. Weekly hours typically run 15–30.

Professional services firms run a fifth pattern. One VA keeps the webinar calendar, pushes follow-up email, and tidies contact records after each event. Most teams here land between 10 and 20 hours a week.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) firms supply most of this labour, and Zapier and Automattic have built distributed marketing teams for over a decade. They mix remote hires with contract VAs for research, list hygiene, and campaign execution.

See our Top 40 BPO companies in the Philippines for sector partners. E-commerce and real estate remain the two verticals where marketing VAs generate the clearest return, according to 2024 Outsource Accelerator client data.

Common thread across every setup — the marketing VA does the ship work, not the strategy. Positioning, brand, and channel-mix calls stay with the client. For the full playbook, read our ultimate guide to outsourcing.

Related terms

These are the terms you will compare a marketing VA against when you scope the hire. The cluster covers the wider remote support model, the marketing disciplines a VA executes inside, and the channel work that sits outside this role.

• Virtual Assistant: general remote support role covering scheduling, inbox, and light research.
• Digital Marketing: channel-spanning practice of promoting a product through search, social, email, and paid media.
• Content Marketing: discipline of publishing owned media to attract and keep a defined audience.
• Social Media Marketing: platform-native paid and organic work that a dedicated social assistant usually owns instead.
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): practice of ranking a site for buyer-intent keywords.
• Outsourcing: commercial arrangement of contracting a task or function to an outside provider.

FAQ

What does a marketing virtual assistant do day-to-day?

They run what you brief: keyword research, ad campaigns, content scheduling, email sequences, reporting, and CRM hygiene. Most specialise in two or three channels rather than every marketing surface at once. Depth beats breadth once the calendar fills up.

How much does a marketing virtual assistant cost?

Offshore rates run $5–$12 per hour in 2024, per Payscale and Upwork data. Boutique specialist agencies charge $25–$60 for senior-level craft, per benchmarks published in Gartner’s insights library. A managed Philippines firm usually lands between the two.

What tools should a marketing VA know?

Table stakes are Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, Google Analytics 4, one email platform (Klaviyo or Mailchimp), and one content management system (WordPress or Shopify). Add Asana or Notion for hand-off. Depth in two beats surface knowledge in all.

Where do most marketing VAs come from?

The Philippines dominates supply on English fluency, cultural fit with US buyers, and training pipelines that have run for two decades. India, Latin America, and Eastern Europe are the next largest sources, per Statista’s outsourcing topic data, 2024.

When should you hire a marketing VA?

Hire a marketing VA when you need steady weekly execution but cannot yet justify a full-time in-house marketing salary.

Ready to shortlist a partner? Compare vetted providers in the OA directory.